Diggings, Backward [Guest Post]

Guest post by Joel H.

Dear Tropophilians,

By way of introduction, and by dint of the medium known as the blogosphere (a world which I have, quite to my own surprise, joined, with the writing of this sentence), I want to link you to the only (other) blog I have ever seen fit to subscribe myself to: http://www.paleofuture.com.

It is a wonderfully kept and researched blog that I will undoubtedly refer to, and comment upon, as the tropophilian population expands. “A look into the future that never was,” its subtitle reads, and Paleo-Future is as visually pleasing as the study of past forms of future-prediction is intellectually stimulating for the person interested in change — especially previous forms of prescience.

I haven’t seen anything about it on Paleo-Future, but one of my favorite examples of the past envisioning the future comes from 1880s Britain. The British had convinced themselves that not only should they dig a “Channel Tunnel” from the English beach alongside Dover under the English Channel to the French coast; they utterly believed in their technological capability and political capacity to do so.

Two digging machines carved out parallel tunnels nearly 100 yards out underneath the water before the project was stopped, but it was British fear of French invasion — rather than any truly technological hangup — that sunk the great engineering project of its time. Who would actually have believed you if, in the late twentieth century, when the “Chunnel” was finally finished, you said that it could have been done one hundred years earlier?

Answer: the preternaturally optimistic British populace of 1880, long since dead and buried by 1994. And we postmoderns thought we had exclusive claim on “progress.” Well, my friends: the past is dead; long live the past.